The scrapping of ambitious plans for the Centre for Music lays bare the place of the arts in austerity-torn Brexit Britain
There always was an artistic case for London to have a 21st-century concert hall. Both the Royal Festival Hall (built in the late 1940s) and the Barbican Hall (1960s-70s) have fundamental problems in matching the best halls in the world. London is – or was – one of the world’s cultural capitals. It could undoubtedly have made rich use of a better venue – a venue that was in the works until ambitious plans for the £288m Centre for Music were scrapped on Thursday.
In a perfect world – in which money was no object, the arts were more celebrated and politicians felt under pressure to treat cultural value seriously – the Centre for Music would have been a marked improvement. Simon Rattle’s 2017 appointment as head of the London Symphony Orchestra, based in the Barbican, gave the project a star power it otherwise lacked.
